Contact
by Kyonkichi89
Summary: Set after "The Blind Banker". John can't figure out why Sherlock keeps touching him; much as the detective might want him to think so, it's clearly no accident.


**Contact**

_For Joyce on Valentine's Day_

The first time Sherlock's hand brushed his elbow while he read the morning paper, John nearly jumped out of his skin. Living on his own as he had since the war, John had almost forgotten that people touched each other casually, that that was something people did; his physical contact since arriving in London had been restricted to handshakes and one brief, awkward hug the first time he'd worked up the nerve to drop in on Harry. One might think that, since he how lived with a flatmate, John would be accustomed to friendly physical expressions of affection, or at least the occasional accidental brushes that occurred when living in close proximity to another human being, but then Sherlock was obviously not an ordinary human being. He barely related to other people, let alone formed comfortable relationships, and he was almost obsessively cautious about avoiding accidental contact. So no, even though John now lived with someone, that someone had never, in John's memory, initiated so much as a handshake.

This suited John just fine. Never having been a very tactile person himself, he preferred not to express affection or anything else through physical contact when a few words would do. The same had always been true of others with regards to him; unlike some people, John Watson did not inspire his mates to do things like clap him on the back in greeting. Even his parents and Harry had never clung to him physically. Perhaps, he thought, this had something to do with his being a soldier, like maybe he actuated the stereotype of stiffness. Not that others viewed him as untouchable – Mrs. Hudson certainly hugged him enough to disabuse him of that notion – but since he did nothing to seek out touch, most people just assumed he didn't like or need it. This wasn't strictly true, of course. He'd been in a handful of physical relationships – not a lot, but enough to know that that kind of contact was fine, good, great sometimes. He still hoped to maybe start something with Sarah, though after last night's fiasco, maybe that was unrealistic. And even when flirting, John tended to go hands-free, for whatever reason.

This being the case, it was no surprise that John's concept of friendship generally did not include playful punches on the arm, arms slung about shoulders, or any other socially acceptable expressions of manly affection. This, coupled with Sherlock's own habitual avoidance of touch, resulted in John spilling his tea all over the morning paper. His head snapped up of its own accord and he stared after Sherlock as the detective made his way to the kitchen for his own cup of tea. Sherlock had felt John start, must have, but he made no indication of having noticed and when he joined John at the table, he didn't say a word about it.

In fact, he didn't say a word about anything for the better part of the morning. He had sent his homeless network operatives instructions to text him pictures of Black Lotus graffiti code in the hopes of determining whether or not a new book had been chosen and his cryptological pursuits completely absorbed him. John decided to take full advantage of the quiet flat, catching up on his blog, which he was actually starting to enjoy, and reading a less sodden copy of the paper borrowed from Mrs. Hudson to his heart's content. But after an hour of companionable silence, John began to suspect that Sherlock was not as fully occupied as he would have him believe.

Sherlock's project had gradually encroached across the table, so John fled to the couch to avoid being swallowed by a mound of books and papers. He sat with his back propped against an arm of the couch, his feet on the adjacent cushion, and from this vantage, Sherlock was in his peripheral vision. It seemed that several times over the course of his calculations, Sherlock would pause and raise his head almost imperceptibly to stare at the side of John's face. Any time John moved to turn his head, Sherlock's eyes would flick downward to resume his intent inspection of the pages before him. Either that or John was hallucinating the whole thing, but he didn't think so. He knew what being watched felt like and had even been the object of Sherlock's piercing stare a few times. What he couldn't understand was why the detective was trying not to draw John's attention when he had never avoided it before. Social niceties were, after all, for people who were not Sherlock.

Finally, after another silent yet curiously tense hour, Sherlock heaved a sigh – of frustration? – and rose to cross the room towards John. He wondered if he was going to address whatever was bothering him, but no, Sherlock's gaze was focused on the end table behind John. As he reached for the book he sought, Sherlock's arm brushed ever so slightly against the back of John's head. He had seen Sherlock moving in his direction, so John didn't jump this time, but this second touch was just as unexpected as the first. Twice in one morning? When Sherlock was involved, that could hardly be an accident.

Perhaps John's less violent response the second time around emboldened Sherlock, because fifteen minutes later, he asked – ordered – John to pass him his phone, which he'd left on the end table. Instead of holding his hand out flat – imperious superiority, minimal contact – he plucked the phone from John's fingers, tracing his fingertips against John's palm. No thank you as usual, no glance up at him, so John figured he was dismissed. He headed to the kitchen to brew a fresh cup and, on a hunch, asked Sherlock if he wanted anything.

"Hmm?" Sherlock seemed genuinely abstracted this time, poring over a heavily cross-referenced copy of _London A-Z._

"The kettle's just boiled. Fancy a cup?"

"Mmm, no," Sherlock said, but as soon as the negative left his lips, he seemed to remember something and looked up at John standing in the kitchen doorway. "Actually, yes," he amended. "I would."

John brought the steaming mug in to Sherlock who looked up from a print-off covered in the yellow cipher with an expectant look. He took the cup from John, which was really the only option because the table was completely covered, but again his fingers brushed against John's, and again Sherlock gave no sign that something unusual was going on.

John fled to the armchair with his tea and pretended to write his blog while he mulled over the situation. Sherlock had never seen fit to touch him casually before now, and yet this made four instances in under three hours, so clearly something had changed. Furthermore, Sherlock didn't touch _anyone_ casually. _And I would know,_ John thought self-deprecatingly. _I make it my policy to notice his every habit._ John felt almost guilty about dwelling on it so much, especially after telling Sherlock it was all fine. And it _was_ fine, at least probably, except that John didn't know what _it_ was in this case and had no idea how to ask.

So they went about their day and more tiny collisions occurred and kept occurring. Sherlock leaned over John's shoulder as he wrote, his hand brushing John's ear before coming to rest on the back of the armchair. John got up to use the loo and Sherlock extended his food the slightest bit so that it grazed John's calf on his way past. Sherlock ordered John to fetch him a pen. John managed to get a paper cut cleaning up Sherlock's abandoned mess, cursed under his breath, and suddenly the detective was there at his shoulder like some dressing-gowned genie, his fingers silently asking if John was alright as they smoothed over the tiny gash. Each subsequent little touch caused a slightly more insistent flutter in John's chest and damn it but if this weren't Sherlock, he'd say he was being seduced. His befuddlement increasing by the moment, he decided that the only thing for it was to escape the flat entirely in the hopes of regaining his sanity.

The biggest shock of the day arrived when Sherlock offered – or, rather, _insisted_ – to accompany him.

"But you never go to the store."

"Of course I go to the store," Came the scathing reply. John just looked at him, lips pursed. "Well, I must have gone to the store before we moved in together, right? Or did you think Mycroft did my shopping?" John continued to stare. "No, I did _not_ buy my groceries online! There was a perfectly nice grocers' near my old residence and the proprietor owed me a favor, so I received a considerable discount. Ask him, he'll tell you."

"And this witness's name was? Just in the interest of proving the most outrageous allegation I've ever heard, you understand."

Sherlock waved a dismissive hand. "Oh, I've deleted it. He filled his obligation to me and then I moved here, so I had no reason to remember his _name_. Coming?"

So John had no choice but to chase after Sherlock, already halfway down the stairs, and follow him the few blocks to the corner shop whose location John had not been convinced Sherlock knew. Needless to say, he did not receive the respite he had been hoping for, as the little touches continued. Shoulders bumping and knuckles brushing as they walked side by side. Hands colliding when they both reached for milk. Fingertips grazing as Sherlock handed John his wallet (the fact that he'd forgotten his own convinced John that his subconscious fully supported the whole touching thing). His breath caught in his chest every time and soon John found himself anticipating his return to the flat as desperately as he'd anticipated leaving. Finally, they arrived back at Baker Street and when their hands touched as they were hanging up their coats, John decided he had had enough.

He caught Sherlock's wrist in a light hold. "Do you want to tell me what this is about?"

Sherlock blinked at him with innocent eyes. "This?"

He refused to play along. "_This_," John said, lightly squeezing Sherlock's wrist.

"Oh." Sherlock's eyes widened in realization. "That's it, John. That's the key." He turned his wrist in John's grip, linking their fingers.

"What?" John's voice emerged as a raspy croak, so he tried again. "What's the key?"

"Isn't it obvious? I've been making work for myself all morning. The case was solved last night, so there's no reason to work on the cipher except to keep myself form being bored. But mundane things like ciphers can't usually hold my attention – you know from experience from that time with the crosswords – unless they're for a case. But I've been working on this one all morning. I can't believe I didn't _see_ it until now. There's _another_ problem that's been hiding in the back of my head, so far back I wasn't even working on solving it directly. The cipher was a way to work though it obliquely, but really the violin would have made more sense because this really is an important problem." Sherlock paused and looked at John expectantly.

John disliked that look because it made him feel even more mentally inadequate than he usually did around Sherlock, so he quirked his lips into an embarrassed smile and asked, "So what's the problem, then?"

"Oh, come _on_ John!" Sherlock admonished "We've been flatmates for long enough now, surely you have some ideas."

"Look, I know you can practically get inside other people's heads, but I can't bloody well see into yours, can I?"

Sherlock looked slightly ill at the prospect. "God, I hope not."

"Well, I can't." But for once, John's admission of ignorance did not prompt Sherlock to show off, perhaps because he always guarded information about the state of his own mind. While he never hesitated to spit out deductions, he never revealed the process by which he reached them, and the structure and inner workings of that powerful mind remained a mystery to John. As Mrs. Hudson put it, whatever went on in that funny head of his was a puzzle. Yet it seemed to be a puzzle Sherlock wanted John to solve, if his expectantly raised eyebrows held any clues on the matter.

Taking his cue, John called upon Sherlock's verbal case-solving method. "It's not about the cipher. That was just a distraction, for both you and me."

"Go on."

"The other thing you've been doing all day makes even less sense than purposely distracting yourself with irrelevant data. You never touch anyone, but today…"

John trailed off and for some inexplicable reason, he found himself blushing and staring at a point three inches to the left of Sherlock's ear. He wrenched his eyes back to Sherlock's face to find him looking unabashed, still expecting John to continue. But he had trouble thinking with those eyes piercing him in a way that insisted John tell Sherlock the answer. _Why? Why does it have to be me? Why can't he figure it out?_ He could almost feel those eyes on him as he'd felt his fingers before, those eyes that saw everything; he could almost see Sherlock's mind behind those eyes, storing every miniscule detail to be sorted through later and determine what was important. Sherlock observed everything, absorbed everything with those eyes. Or almost everything. On arriving at a crime scene, he would look at everything first, absorb it, store it. Often, he only needed that first glance to gather all the necessary information, but sometimes sight was not enough. Sometimes…_Feeling for moisture on an umbrella and coat collar. Picking a bullet out of a dead man's mouth. Slipping a ring off a finger. Rubbing spray paint between his fingers._ Sometimes, when Sherlock needed to gather more data, he would –

"Touch," John breathed. "You were gathering information about…me?" Sherlock's eyes were very bright and they had not moved from John's face over the few minutes it had taken him to reach this realization. Sherlock's eyes were only still when they rested upon a piece of information utterly crucial to the case and needed to absorb and store it down to the tiniest detail. Sherlock was looking at _him_ like that, and it made his throat go dry.

"But what information about me could you possibly need?"

"All of my senses are usually quite reliable," Sherlock remarked, voice absent but eyes still piercing, "And I'm hardly ever prone to irrationality. I'm told it's human, that humans are irrational, but I don't understand it." A pleading note crept into Sherlock's voice. "I don't _know_ why. But I think you do."

John sucked in a breath. "Alright. Um. Want to warn me the next time you plan to make some earth-shattering comment?" At Sherlock's blank look, John laughed in exasperation. "You just claimed that I know something you don't. Of your own accord. And we're not talking about the solar system, here. That's – well. Unprecedented is putting it lightly."

Sherlock rolled his eyes. "Of course there are things you know that I don't. What's fine, for one thing. What's good. What _people_ do." That pleading tone was back and John didn't quite know what to do about it.

"Okay. Okay, so you want me to tell you…why today you're doubting your senses? Why you need to gather extra data by touching things. Me. Touching me." Sherlock gave a tight little nod. "Well, what specifically does the information need to be about?"

"It doesn't make any _sense_," Sherlock's fingers dug into his temples. "You're right here, right _here_, and I still…"

"Wait, you think I'm not here?" If that were the case, how could they even be having this conversation? John felt leagues out of his depth.

"I know you're here, but there's this little idea that maybe you aren't, maybe –"

"How can that be, Sherlock? What could have happened to –" And then it hit him. "_Oh._ I know what this is. Why didn't I see it before?" John laughed out loud, realizing how much he sounded like Sherlock in that moment. "It's because of last night." Sherlock's blank look almost had him laughing again, but he controlled himself, not wanting to miss his one chance to explain something to Sherlock Holmes. "I did almost die, you know. Ruddy great crossbow. Triad general with a gun. Chinese acrobat with a penchant for strangling. Sounding familiar? It could have ended badly in any of a dozen ways."

"But it didn't! So why –"

"Because!" John said triumphantly, nearly giddy with it. "Because. You were worried. You might have lost me. Sherlock, I might have _died_. You _care_, Sherlock. You care, and you're right, it's not rational, it makes no sense. But you know you could have lost me last night and it scared you and you worried and so you need to gather information to convince yourself that I'm still here, that I'm not dead." By the time John finished delivering that neat little deduction he was almost grinning.

"But I _know_ you're not dead. You're _obviously _not dead. You're right, I've been gathering data all day, but the possibility is still there in my head, even though all the facts have disproved it."

"You said the cipher was just a distraction from the real problem, the important puzzle. And you had to ask me for help on this one, The Case of Sherlock's Human Tendencies. Maybe you want to figure me out because you don't get it yet."

"Get what?" Sherlock sounded skeptical.

"Caring? Emotions in general? A feeling having even the tiniest bit of dominance over reason? God knows I don't get how your brain works and I've been trying to puzzle that out since we met."

"So you're saying what? That I care about you, that it's irrational, that you understand human irrationality, so therefore the important problem is…what?"

"Me?" John suggested.

And Sherlock's face, hitherto clouded by a combination of confusion and skepticism, suddenly cleared. "Ah. Thank you, John. You're right of course. _You_ are the important problem. I don't know why I didn't see it before. But," Sherlock paused, brows wrinkled and vision unfocused as if trying to locate a wayward piece of data. "Yes, it's still there, that idea. I don't suppose there's any way to convince my human tendencies that you're not, in fact, dead. Goes along with caring, does it?"

"Of course you can care about someone without suspecting that they might be dead." John laughed at the absurdity of the whole situation, but in its context he felt almost secure about what he was about to do. "As to getting rid of that thought, I'm not completely sure of the cure, though I do have one idea."

Sherlock raised an eyebrow. "Do tell. You've been doing admirably so far."

"It's more of a showing thing. Hands-on, if you like. Don't worry, plenty of data to be had."

John raised a hand to Sherlock's cheek and stroked his fingers across the impossibly pale, smooth skin stretched over equally impossible cheekbones. He decided he could get used to this kind of aimless contact, though this felt anything but casual. Smiling reassuringly in response to his questioning look, John drew Sherlock's face downwards and leaned up to press his mouth against Sherlock's. He kissed back almost at once, lips teasing at John's as if to draw physical answers from him. John opened his mouth and an exploratory tongue continued the work Sherlock's lips had begun, first tracing the outline of John's lips before dipping inside. The kiss was systematic, thorough, and undoubtedly designed to yield maximum data, but John shivered helplessly under its onslaught all the same. Clinging to Sherlock for life and in near-terror over what he'd started, John nevertheless hoped desperately that he was a case Sherlock could never solve.


End file.
